Cilla Black: 'I never thought I'd be on TV'

For a moment it seems as if Cilla Black is about to cause a major storm. It's so unlikely. Throughout her career Cilla – and you always are on first-name terms with Cilla – has proved herself a genius at putting everyone at their ease. She was the queen of Saturday night TV, who had a pitch- perfect understanding of her audience. She has hosted more than 500 TV shows, made 400 guest appearance and become one of the most watched women on British TV. She's about to receive the special award from Bafta in recognition of all those talents. She doesn't do controversial.

And yet, all of a sudden she is sailing very close to the wind. "I don't want to see older people on TV," she says bluntly, when asked whether she would ever return to the small screen that she has dominated during a career lasting more than half a century. "I want to see young, pretty people on TV."

Really? So does that mean, say, 75-year-old David Dimbleby should call it a day? Cilla, aged 70, pauses. She looks at me and raises one finger. "Unless they've got talent. Then they should stay. It's all about the talent. Dimbleby has talent."

It's vintage Cilla Black. What could have been front page news – "Cilla tells Dimbleby to quit" – becomes a vehicle for praise. Then again she always was supple. In anybody else's hands Blind Date, which she fronted from 1985 to 2003, could have been a sludge of grotesque innuendo and nudge-nudge gags. With Cilla in charge it became sweet, warm and at times genuinely romantic. It was the same with Surprise Surprise, which she hosted from 1984 to 2001. She made ordinary people in a heightened emotional state feel that everything would be OK.

Top of the pops: Cilla Black in her singing days. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

It's a quality she freely acknowledges. "Blind Date was based on an Australian show called Perfect Match, which I first saw when I was on tour there," she says. "And I couldn't understand why it wasn't on British TV." The eventual producer in Britain, Alan Boyd, told her it was because it would never get past the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) because of the sexual connotations. "Later, he told me that when he was trying to come up with the right presenter he tried to think of the most sexless person on TV," Cilla says. "He said it was me. Well that was nice." The pilots fronted by Cilla were passed by the IBA. Blind Date became one of the highest-rated shows on British television, with more than 18 million people watching at its peak. "I was the mother hen,' she says.

Not bad for a girl who grew up in a house without a television. "I never thought I'd be on TV," she says now. "For me as a kid in Liverpool it was a more realistic option to be a singer." Bolstered by number one hit songs such as "Anyone Who Had a Heart" and "You're My World", that was an ambition quickly achieved. Her early work on the small screen, however, suggested her talents began and ended with music. There was an appearance on Juke Box Jury when she smoked all the way through. "I wasn't a smoker. I thought it was cool. It wasn't." Then there was the show where she was booked to sing and asked to dance in the instrumental section. "I had no sense of where the cameras were and danced right past them leaving the screen empty."

By the late 1960s, however, when her own series, Cilla, was commissioned by BBC1, she had come to understand the medium. It ran until 1976 and gathered audiences of up to 22 million. So what does it take to succeed on TV? "You need a personality," she says, simply. "You need to be able to articulate and to join in. Live TV can sniff fakery a long way off so you have to be real. And you also need to not care what people say about you."

So when you watch yourself back what are you looking for? "Oh, I can't watch myself back," she says. What, never? "No. I haven't ever seen myself back. That's why I love live TV, 'cos it's quickly gone and done." In truth, she says, she didn't need to watch, because she had her late husband and manager Bobby to do that. He watched everything she did (a role now taken on by her son and manager, Robert). "I could have a million people saying what I had done was great – and Bobby would say that it wasn't that great. You'd need that to stop you getting big headed."

Surprise Surprise: Holly Willoughby with Cilla Black. Photograph: ITV

Did she come to take her success on television for granted? "I tried never to take anything for granted," she says, though she admits that the job on Blind Date came easier to her. "It was a doddle for me, though I was only as good as the researchers and the three people they presented me with." She recognised the way those contestants would relax when she was finally able to get close and interact with them. "I could see the relief on their faces: she's here, she's coming over."

Towards the end, Bobby fell ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, though she had to carry on with the show. "That was very difficult," she says. After that came the changes to the format, the way they stopped her interacting with the contestants, so she was more of a straightforward presenter. "That wasn't me. I wasn't enjoying it any more." Famously on 4 January 2003, during a live edition of the show, she quit on air. "I said to Robert if I haven't done it in the first 10 minutes I'm not going to do it." She quit in the first 10 minutes. "I didn't want them to talk me out of it." She looks sheepish for a moment. "It was terribly unprofessional of me."

What does she think of the current crop of reality television shows which arguably are the descendants of her work, making ordinary members of the public the stars? "Oh I love things like Britain's Got Talent and the I'm a Celeb… Reality TV is here to stay."

A few days before we met Bruce Forsyth had announced his retirement from Strictly Come Dancing. Was that a job she fancied? "Ha, I couldn't do that, I couldn't dance down those stairs. Anyway I'd get bored. I'd be saying, 'Enough about you. It's all about me.' But I'm so distressed Brucie's going. He's 86, of course. He probably wants more time to do what he wants to do." Which is when she says she doesn't want to see old people like her on TV any more. And when she quickly qualifies herself.

As to the Bafta Special Award she is, she says, "very flattered and honoured". I ask her where she'll put it. She gives her famous toothy grin. "I'll put it alongside the other one that I got for Blind Date. It's on a shelf above the radiator in the hall." That way, she says, they can both be polished at the same time. After all, Cilla does have standards.